moore27_0064_el.JPG Christopher Moore,writer Christopher Moore,writer, surrounded by characters from his book A Dirty Job. In particular character Charlie Asher (aligator) created from a character in the book. The Sartotial Creatures were designed and built by Monique Motil and on display at Paxton Gate in the Mission. Photographer: Eric Luse / SFChronicleRan on: 04-10-2006 Christopher Moore is surrounded by Sartorial Creatures, soft sculptures by Monique Motil, that became characters in Moore's book &quo;A Dirty Job.&quo;

Fool

By Christopher Moore

Give San Francisco comic novelist Christopher Moore full marks for plunging into deep waters. In "Lamb" (2003), he set out to narrate Jesus' coming-of-age story in a "Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal." In his rambunctious new book, "Fool," Moore undertakes nothing less than a prose retelling of "King Lear."

Not content to restrict himself to that capacious and penetrating tragedy itself, Moore rummages around in a dozen or so of Shakespeare's other plays for characters, plot points, imagery and dialogue. Lifts from "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Julius Caesar," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Love's Labour's Lost" are overt. Some of the other appropriations are slyer. The result is a Bardic stew liberally seasoned with slapstick, sex, groaner puns, anachronisms and plenty of cheerfully curdled Elizabethan wordplay.

Playing fast and loose with Shakespeare is a long-standing practice, as Moore notes in a postscript, aptly titled "You Cheeky Git." Nahum Tate's 1687 version of "King Lear," which appended a happy ending to the play, held the stage for several centuries. Tom Stoppard saw "Hamlet" through the lens of two minor characters, in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," and also produced a 15-minute version of Shakespeare's play. "MacHomer," with Homer Simpson in the title role, has made several visits to the Bay Area.

Moore, who acknowledges everyone from Oscar Wilde to P.G. Wodehouse to Eddie Izzard as inspirations, participates eagerly in the tradition of irreverent homage. He freely distorts the action of "Lear," adds and alters characters and throws his narrative voice around in a sustained act of Shakespearean ventriloquism. "Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance," goes one of Gloucester's soliloquies here, "leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair."

That's relatively mild stuff compared with the eponymous narrator's playfully frank way of putting things. After a lively sexual encounter with Lear's daughter Goneril, the Fool reflects, "What a bitter bitch to cast me out while my bum still burned with the blows of her passion. The bells on my coxcomb drooped in despair."

In transforming "King Lear" into a potty-mouthed jape, Moore is up to more than thumbing his nose at a masterpiece. His version of Shakespeare's Fool, who accompanies Lear on his slide from paternal arrogance to spiritual desolation in the original text, simultaneously honors and imaginatively enriches the character. Moore gives his hero a name, Pocket, to signal his diminutive physical stature; provides a backstory in which suffering is balanced by resourceful cunning and rueful insight; and includes a cast of low-comic supporting players, including his physically and sexually imposing sidekick, Drool.

Most important, the author builds a nuanced sensibility behind all of Pocket's anarchic mischief. Don't be fooled by this fool's fixation on "wankers," "tossers," "shagging" and "slags." In both his clear-eyed assessments of other people and his recollections of an emotionally bruising past, the book's narrator takes on a paradoxical solemnity. Sorrow and sex are intimately bound in Pocket's worldview. "Life is loneliness," he reflects, "broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk."

"Fool," which is divided into five "acts," turns too plot-busy at the end, as Moore hastens to mete out punishment to Goneril and Regan, play out the bastard Edmund's machinations, wrap up various offstage military maneuvers and effect a storybook romance for the virtuous and ill-served Cordelia. Some of the book's self-conscious tendencies, which include sometimes superfluous footnotes and a late "Intermission," wear thin.

But even in its businesslike bustling, "Fool" still finds room to track its oddly affecting hero's quest for meaning in a messily meaning-challenged world. Thinking about a life outside his service to the king, Pocket feels fear "run down my spine like the tip of a spike. Without Lear, I was no longer a fool. I had no purpose. I had no home. Still, after what he had done, I would have to find some other means to make my way."

Moore's Fool plays out the psychological tension that informs most of Shakespeare's fools, especially the one in "King Lear." While our heart-struck sympathies may linger with the tragic king, our minds keep getting snagged by his comic servant's incisive, despairing wit. Here, the fool gets the full attention that he's so cagily earned.